


Halo

by Kicker



Category: Fallout 4
Genre: Alcohol, F/F, I don't know, I haven't written it yet, Slow Burn, Swearing, if there's any burn at all
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-08-27
Updated: 2017-07-09
Packaged: 2018-08-11 10:48:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 13,408
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7888315
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kicker/pseuds/Kicker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Annie Rosalia Halo Taylor (don't tell her I told you those middle names) is Commonwealth born and bred. You're born on a farm, you die on a farm, and just hope there ain't too many raiders in between those two points.</p>
<p>She's not quite ready to accept that fate, and her Ma taught her better anyway. So when a certain blue-jumpsuit-wearing troublemaker is spat out into a world she doesn't recognize or understand, and Annie just happens to be nearby? She decides to lend a hand.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> One of my untouched challenges for this fic-writing thing is a wholly original OC. Here she is. I don't know where she came from or where she's going, not quite. Don't really care, to be honest. She's just quite fun to write.

On 13th August, 2282, Annie Rosalia Halo Taylor died.

Not her body, you understand, and not her mind, we're not talking a metaphor for ghoulification here. But she'd just patted down the earth on the last person who knew her by her full name and that felt like the end of her, too.

She got to her feet, a movement that had been giving her trouble for far longer than it had taken her to dig out the grave, and checked the back of her hand was at least mostly clean before wiping her nose with it.

"Night, ma," she said.

Now, starting a story with a dead woman, real or metaphorical isn't something I like to do ordinarily, and I've just done both. But neither of them are the insert-tragic-backstory kind of death so I figure you'll forgive me this once.

Ma Taylor - Rosie Diana Moon Taylor (née Taylor, she never felt the need to marry) - had passed away in her sleep a few days before. Nothing personal, nothing violent, nothing painful, far as I know. She was sixty-four years old and she just decided she wanted to be done. And what Ma Taylor wanted, Ma Taylor got. She'd spent the evening just as full of piss and vinegar and bright wide smiles as ever, then she'd shuffled over to Annie, little Annie she called her even though she'd always been taller than the older ones, and squeezed her shoulder.

"You mind that halo don't slip," she said, and put herself to bed.

And Annie knew what that meant, not because of the Sight, that was best left to wiser, better folk than her, but still she wasn't surprised in the morning to see her Ma all peaceful, deep in the final sleep.

Annie went through those stages of grieving pretty fast. There was no point denying what was right in front of her face, and she never much saw the point in anger anyway, just makes the blood hot and the face red and the things you love broken. She bargained with the earth to make it a little softer under the blade of her shovel but that didn't work. It was August, after all, hadn't rained for weeks, so with every shovel out half a shovel drifted back into the hole as dust.

It wasn't her Ma making things difficult, it was the world itself, and you and I both know it does a lot of that these days.

There were plenty enough things needed doing around the farmstead so she combined depression and acceptance into a sort of hazily productive gloom. She fixed up the windows and tidied up the mutfruit orchard, if you could call it that what with only three of them in there. She mended the crack in the bottom of the brahmin trough, not that they had one of those beasts since the mutfruit incident but whoever took the place on wouldn't be best pleased to see the resultant mudbath if they did try to use it.

After a few days of this she sat on the porch, cracked open a Gwinnett Pale, and listened out for the sound of claws clacking over the floorboards.

Sure enough, there they were.

"Lookin' pretty mangy there, Earl," she said.

The dog sneezed in reply, then turned around and sat down, planting his bony ass right on her foot. He was supposed to be feral, and maybe one day he would be, but at that time he was soft and pliant as a jet-soaked ghoul. He'd showed up as a tiny, glistening, stinking little thing that had looked more like a molerat than a dog. Then he'd raised his little head to the sky and let out the cutest little squeak.

"Howlin' at the moon," she'd said, and her Ma had nodded and scooped him up in her arms.

Growing up hadn't been easy for him what with the state of his poor skin but Ma Taylor knew a couple of salves from a time of her life she never really talked about. Well, that's not entirely true, she talked about it plenty. One month she was a gun-slinger, the next a chem-runner, and she kept the Raider story going for years before she finally grinned and 'fessed up that it wasn't true. Only constant in the stories was a place called Goodneighbor. As a kid, Annie thought it sounded like the kind of place she wanted to visit. Held somewhat less of an appeal now, at the age of twenty-eight.

Earl's claws scrabbled on the floorboards again. He bounced up onto his feet, staring keenly down the way, nose up in the air. He ran down to the end of the path, barked a couple times but the furious wag of his skinny little tail told Annie there was no need to reach out for her shotgun, propped up close beside her.

The trader yanked her brahmin to a halt, and raised her fingers to her forehead. "Afternoon, darlin'."

"Carla," said Annie. "You musta set off early today."

"Well, it was hot and lonely in my bedroll, so I figured I'd come out here and find someone to talk to." Carla grinned and lit up a cigarette, still outside the property bounds because she'd been shouted at by her old pal Rosie enough times to know not to do it inside the fence. She squinted up into the sun, and they both listened to the dry rustle of dead grass and shifting dust.

"Ma's gone," said Annie.

Carla looked at the cigarette between her fingers as though it had just transformed into the least appetizing thing in the world, and maybe it had because she dropped it half-smoked and ground it under her boot.

"I'm sorry to hear that," she said.

"Thank you," said Annie. She waited a few moments for the knot of pain in her chest to die down before going on. First time you say the words out loud is always the hardest. "In her sleep, nice and peaceful."

"Well," said Carla, after another few moments, maybe dealing with a pang of her own. "I didn't hear no explosions, and that's about the only thing that'd take Rosie out if she weren't good and ready."

Annie smiled, a bittersweet smile that matched the one on Carla's face. She got to her feet, wandered out into the sun to stand by the gate, right next to the big old brahmin.

"Hey Janus," she said, patting him on the rump. A brown eye peered back at her, past the haphazardly-piled and strapped and hanging crates and bags on his back.

"What's in the crate?" asked Carla, a pair of sharp brown eyes of her own picking out the rectangular junk box Annie had dragged down to the road earlier that day.

"Junk," she said. "I heard you're something of a fan."

"Junk?" said Carla. "For me? Are you trying to butter me up?"

Annie smiled. "Might be after a little favor, yeah. When you're in Bunker Hill next, will you put the word out that I'm looking to sell?"

Carla finally got herself back together enough to light another cigarette. "This place?" she said, from the corner of her mouth, the other one being occupied by said cigarette. "Ain't this been Taylor property for generations?"

"Yup," said Annie. "But there ain't gonna be no more. Generations, that is. Figure it'd suit some family better. Got two whole rooms, after all."

"C'mon, girl," said Carla. "You're young, yet. You got plenty of time to find yourself a husband."

And that made Annie laugh, a real laugh that lasted until she was pulling open the lid of the crate.

Carla squatted down next to her, and just nudged her with her elbow. "I'll pass the word around. I might be going up north through Lexington, too, but I don't know if you'd want any of those assholes in your ancestral home."

"I trust you, Carla," said Annie. "Do what you think's best."


	2. Chapter 2

It took about eight months to get rid of the place. You didn't get many visitors dropping in that far out on the coast, too many rumors of deathclaws and mad old women with the Sight. The radstorms weren't so bad out that way, mostly because they had to fight with the actual storms rolling in off the ocean. Game of rock-paper-scissors, really, except humans eventually lose against everything.

So a couple months passed, then a couple more. There aren't many homes as look better with charming green interior lighting or hail bouncing in through newly-sprung leaks in the roof, so Annie stayed put. And once winter passed, and Annie fixed those leaks, it might have been easier to sell if the place had some electricity but Ma Taylor had never been one for the stuff. 'An improperly wired generator's a fire hazard', she'd always sniff, as she lit up an oil lamp and put it on the floor.

So, Annie stayed put.

She stayed put long enough that it did sell, and in spring she stood at the end of the path and shook hands with a fresh-faced young man and his equally-fresh faced young wife and she hoped to God they weren't as fresh-brained as they looked or they'd end up food for stingwings within the year. She made her way down the road with a pack full of caps and ammo, shotgun in her hands, and Earl trotting happily at her side.

It wasn't until she was just out of sight of her old home that she figured she ought to think about what she was actually going to do with herself.

She started in Bunker Hill, an invitation from Carla, but after a lifetime of sharing a space with just three then two then one then no other bodies it was too loud and busy and angry for her. The caravan folk started their shouting at stupid dark in the morning, and didn't stop til stupid dark in the evening, and by then it was fueled by beer and even more irritating.

Annie tried travelling with one of the caravans, thinking that at least on the road there wouldn't be quite so many of them around, but it just meant they were closer to her. Some of them tried to get far too close, in fact, though after a broken nose or twisted arm or two they let her be. In between jobs, in idle conversation with a passing gun trader, she discovered that she was pretty handy with a hunting rifle. But when you're walking that doesn't do you much good. You gotta be poised, waiting, hoping to get the drop on something, not waiting to react to someone as has done the same to you.

So she had a shotgun in her hands when the raiders came 'collecting'. The caravan leader himself dropped to the ground with a perfect red circle in the center of his forehead, first sign of any kind of trouble. The other guard took out the offender sharpish, right in the middle of her foolhardy fist-pumping celebration, but there were four raiders for two guards so he didn't stand much of a chance. He softened them up good, though, so one lay bleeding out on the cracked-up sidewalk and one crashed groaning into a dumpster.

Of the other two, the brahmin kicked the face off one as he tried to make a darting run around the back of her, and Annie took the face off the next with a shell from point-blank range. Then there was a bit of a standoff with the last one, him now behind the dumpster, her behind the brahmin because even raiders aren't so stupid as to kill the only method of transportation of their ill-gotten goods. Lucky, really, considering the big old bag of grenades hanging off the side of old Betsy. If he'd caught that with a bullet, the whole street would have been a goner.

(The caravan leader hadn't named the brahmin that, by the way. That was Annie's name for her. She was normally called 'you bastard' or 'for fuck's sake, move' which didn't seem to Annie to be a respectful way to refer to an animal, even one as stubborn as Betsy.)

She pulled out a grenade, doing the mental math of how many caps she should put back in the pot, and tossed it through the air at the raider. Boom. And it turned out people sometimes disposed of flammable items in dumpsters. Double-boom.

A single bullet or maybe just a piece of debris pinged out of the flames and hit the brahmin in the meat of the leg. What with that and the booming it took all of Annie's weight and most of the curse words she'd picked up from Carla over the years to make poor Betsy stand still long enough to get a stimpak in. Three, in fact, hundred forty-four caps no discount, probably more than the beast had cost to begin with.  
  
Then all of a sudden she had a pack brahmin of her own, albeit one with a permanent limp and list to the right. Finders keepers, or something like that.

Even that life wasn't exactly to Annie's taste. Being on the road was fine, with Earl at her heels and Betsy huffing and shitting as she walked. Well, that's not exactly fine or pleasant itself, it's just a comforting part of being on the road. You guessed it - Ma Taylor had something to say about that, too, and it was this: 'If a brahmin ain't shittin' it ain't eatin' enough, and if it ain't eatin' enough it ain't carryin' enough neither.'

Wise words.

Annie ended up on the same route as Carla which she knew pissed Carla off, and not a little bit, but there weren't many settlements around or routes safe enough to travel. She diversified, tried to let Carla have the junk monopoly while she went more ammo'n'guns but that kinda cargo gets you more attention. She ended up with too many people stopping her and asking her exactly where she was planning on going, and then missed too many opportunities taking detours round the inevitable ambushes.

Plus, at the end of the trail, she still ended up in Bunker Hill.

She ditched Betsy with some crag-faced trader, don't pull on her leash too hard, she lists off but she does come back onto the straight when she notices, and don't get too close to left-Betsy when she gets that look in her eyes. No, not _as-you-look-at-her_ left-Betsy, _left_ -Betsy. You even listening?

The deal was done at a place called the Drumlin Diner, run by a woman named Trudy and her kid Patrick who had a wild look in his eyes already, a look Annie'd seen before. Her brother, Peter, five or six years older than her though they weren't quite sure of the exact dates. He'd disappeared off a few years previous, never came back. Nothing of him came back except a note from a 'friend' saying he'd been found in the streets, beaten to a pulp and stripped of all his worldly possessions.

(The letter wasn't so graphic, but it was pretty obvious that was how it was, and that it was down to the chems to which those wild eyes had led him.)

But Annie smiled nice at the kid and punched him in the arm a little because she didn't really know how to relate to kids that weren't her own brothers, but it seemed to work. And she let herself think that maybe some guardian angel would drop down from the sky and save him before it got too far.

Yeah. I know. And maybe caps grow on trees.

Sitting on a fold-up chair outside the diner, watching Betsy snorting and shitting and listing her way down the road, Annie found once again that she'd turned the page on one chapter of her life without thinking about the next one. The area was pretty nice, she thought. Couple of farms, and the diner, and a whole lot of insects. With a good radstag breeding territory up to the north and not too much in the way of feral activity, she decided to try out being a hunter for a while. 

So she found herself a broken-down old shack, polished off that hunting rifle, and settled into a routine.


	3. Chapter 3

So it was that one fine October morning in 2287, or an October morning at any rate, that Annie was walking the path just north of Concord. The gunfire had started up early that morning, and she couldn't help but think it seemed a little more full-hearted than normal. There were always a few raiders out taking pot-shots at tin cans or molerats or each other, but it tended to be somewhat half-hearted. Gristle was probably one of the laziest raiders out there and it suited his gang just fine. They had just enough to go on with the occasional fresh-faced and fresh-brained caravan dropping through thinking Concord was still a real town. But they never really needed to pick a fight.

Not her problem.

She rolled her shoulders, not sure if the cold patch of damp on her back was from the fresh-washed radstag hide leaking through her pack, or maybe one of the plastic containers of bloody meat she'd hacked off it before the feral mutts descended to finish it off. Might just have been the sweat from the effort of carrying it, cooling instantly in the fresh autumnal air.

Even that probably makes it sound nicer than it was. It was cold as shit and smelled like a moldy swamp. There. Romanticize that, if you can.

Whichever it was, the damp patch that is, she forgot about it pretty quick when a few shots rang out right ahead of her. Even Earl put his hackles up, so much as he was able to without any fur on the back of his neck, and Annie swung up her rifle and made her way forwards careful like, skirting around into the dead underbrush.

One gun, or two of the exact same small caliber taking perfectly timed turns to shoot.

One gun, then. Annie just always liked to consider more than the obvious before getting into a situation.

She looked down from behind her cover to see a figure standing there at the crossroads, bright blue skintight suit, eye-wateringly tight to Annie's eyes, three yellow numbers on the back.

111.

"What in the hell?" said Annie, to nobody in particular.

The girl, or so Annie guessed from the shape of her, was squeezing the trigger on some little peashooter at a stingwing that was dancing over the corpse of a brahmin. If Annie didn't know better she'd think the girl had her eyes screwed shut tight because the bullets weren't getting anywhere near it.

Earl was still grumbling beside her but not leaping forward as was usually his wont, which was odd seeing how much he loved a good mouthful of stingwing. And it was easy to see why when the breeze brought a low growl to her ears, and if it's not too offensive to poor Earl to say it, a proper dog, fur and all, looked up from the stingwing it'd already downed and fixed its eyes on the still-flying one.

Finally the blue-clad figure managed to get a bullet in the insect, Lord only knows how, providence or some such. It spat out the old stinging juice at her with about as bad an aim as she had, then buzzed angrily away off the path, and right for Annie.

Well. At the ripe old age of thirty-three by then, Annie had dealt with her fair share of stingwings, and it was the north and October after all, so she already had a baseball bat slung off the back of her pack for just this purpose.

Stingwing buzzed up, Annie lined up, and smacked that sucker down for Earl to take. She hit it a little hard, in fact, because the still-buzzing body skittered some way down the slope, and the dog didn't bound away after it like she expected but just stood stiff in front of her.

The other dog did, too, facing Earl, neck low, poised and taut.

"Easy now," said Annie, and it was kind of addressed at both of the dogs, not that either of them probably knew what she was talking about. For all she knew that combination of noises might be a deadly insult in dog-speak so she shut up and left them to it. The doggy code.

Sniff nose.  
Sniff neck.  
Sniff butt. Sniff butt more. Make sure you've had a real good sniff of that butt in case the first two weren't good enough.

"Get a room," she muttered, and turned her attention to the girl.

One-one-one was kinda crouched, kinda sat on the ground with a dirty old scarf in her hand, mopping up the few drops of stingwing spatter that had landed on her sleeve. At the sound of footsteps, or just from wild paranoia, she got to her feet, too fast, almost overbalancing herself. She dragged out that peashooter and pointed it right at Annie.

Well. Sort of at Annie. Pointed at Annie the every fifteen seconds or so when it wasn't pointed at the sky, past her elbow, or past her ear. She would have ducked and weaved or whatever, only that would probably have increased the chances of being hit, if the girl had actually pulled the trigger.

Annie didn't think she was really going to do that, but she slung the bat back over its hook, and held up her hands anyway.

"Don't worry, honey," she said. "I ain't gonna hurt you. And I know they all say that, but I mean it."

The girl stared, wild-eyed. Wild-haired, too, but she was the cleanest little thing Annie had seen in her life, except for the dirty green spatter on that sleeve.

"Where're you headed, honey?" said Annie, staying rock-steady on her feet because those hands had stopped wavering and the peashooter, though still only a peashooter, probably a 10 mil by the size of it, was looking a little more aimed than she was entirely comfortable with.

"Don't call me honey," she said.

"Okay," said Annie, and bit back the urge to do what Petie had always done, _okay, sugar, sure thing, I won't call you honey._

"Who are you?" asked the girl.

Halo, she thought. And that thought surprised Annie, because she'd never used it as a name before, never even thought to. It was just an extra little word in her name, some arcane little family tradition that'd die with her like every other one of them.

"Annie," she said.

_You mind that halo don't slip._

_It ain't slippin' ma. It's just too bright out here for you to see it._

"What are you?" said the girl.

"I'm just a hunter," she said, carefully. "Scavenger in my spare time, but not the bad kind."

"What's the bad kind?" asked the girl.

Annie blinked, because there's not much you can say to that kind of question. "The kind that kills you for your stuff," she said. "Instead of just taking it after you're dead."

The girl's arms dropped down to her sides. "They are going to kill me, aren't they."

"Who?"

The girl gestured with her head down the road to Concord, a merry little rhythm of gunfire floating over the rooftops, punctuated by the odd howling scream. The movement of her head shook a tear free from one eye, a tear that dripped down the side of her face, a tear that nearly got mopped up by the ichor-stained sleeve of that bright blue jumpsuit.

"Shit, no, don't do that," said Annie and jumped forward to grab the girl's arm before she could rub fresh stingwing juice right in her eyeball. "Do you want to go blind?"

The girl dropped the gun from her weak, loose fingers and Annie flinched because her Ma once told her about a raider who'd been shot in the ankle by the very gun he'd ordered a victim to drop. Not an image you can easily lose, even when you know it's an impossibility because the same woman as is telling the story also taught you everything you know about guns.

"This is real," said the girl, and her voice was faint as Annie ever heard one. "This is real, isn't it?"

Annie fixed her in the eyes, sweet brown eyes they were, though ringed with wet clumped eyelashes and shot through with threads of pink.

"I'm afraid so."


	4. Chapter 4

Annie sat the girl down by the side of the road, but for me to keep calling her a girl isn't really fair or true, as during the course of conversation _what's your name, where are you from, Sanctuary, huh, is there someone back there who knows where you've gone?_  it comes out that the girl is actually older than Annie herself. And not just by the two hundred ten years in the Vault, which you and I already know about of course, but a full eighteen months which is a lifetime for too many folk in the Commonwealth.

Her name was Angela which gave Annie a moment's pause for thought, _Angel and Halo, whaddya know,_ but she didn't say nothing because she hadn't told her about the Halo part and wasn't about to neither. She scoped out the area, made sure there were no more insects to come and gob stinking fluids over them, then kneeled down by Angela's side with a pot of salve, Ma Taylor's special blend, and the same dirty scarf she'd been using to mop it before, folded up neat to stop it getting on her fingers.

"Are you an Angela too?" asked the girl - not-girl - with a sharp intake of breath that said she wasn't quite done crying yet.

"Nope," replied Annie. "Just Annie. Maybe Anne, my Ma always liked to make things more complicated than they needed to be."

"Sounds like me," said Angela, with a weak smile.

You're gonna be okay, thought Annie, just as a fresh spray of gunfire echoed up from down the road.

Earl had gone off to rub his face in the guts of one of the stingwings, disgusting creature that he was, but Angela's dog sat at attention in the middle of the road, watching. Annie looked up from the sleeve, _probably safe to rub your face with it now_ to see a big old yawn and a big pink tongue and some small but very sharp white teeth.

"What's his name?" she asked.

"I don't know," said Angela. "He was just... there. I don't know if I'd even have made it this far without him."

_Guardian angels take on all sorts of forms. Don't send any of 'em away just cos they ain't pretty enough._

_Shut up, Ma._

"So," said Annie. "Why're you heading on down into gunfire central?"

The girl - shit, sorry - Angela's eyes welled up again but she pressed her lips tight and fought back the tears. "I need people. Find people. Who can help. Codsworth said..."

Annie reached out a hand and touched it to her shoulder. "It's okay. I get it. Are they friends?"

Angela shook her head. "I don't know anyone. Not any more."

"Okay. There's a lot of raiders down there. Proper assholes, too. They're not gonna help you. You should... we should go back to Sanctuary, get you calmed down."

Then the dog barked, like he wanted in on the conversation.

"I wasn't talking to you," said Annie.

But the dog barked again, and he jumped in a circle, and he took a few pattering steps down toward the town and back again, bark, patter, bark, et cetera.

Annie shook her head. Dogs.

"I need to go to Concord," repeated Angela. "I need to know. I have to find..."

"It's a bad idea," said Annie. "Seriously. Don't."

Then Angela's cheeks shone rosy red, and she scrambled to her feet. "Don't you fucking tell me what to do," she said. "You don't know me. I don't fucking know you. I don't need you. If I want to go down there, I'll go down there."

_Yeah, and you'll die._

Angela was already struggling to pull a box of ammo from a pocket on that stupid-tight jumpsuit, and cramming the bullets into the pea-shooter like she really did intend to march down there, so Annie got to her feet and brushed the dust from her knees.

"Alright," she said, hoping she'd got enough ammo of her own, and wishing that her pack was lighter. "But I'm coming with you. Okay?"

Angela's eyes darted up and her mouth opened like she was about to throw the offer back in Annie's face, but the dog barked again and distracted her.

Canis ex machina, what can you say.

She could load the gun, that was obvious, it was just anger getting in the way of doing it neatly. But Annie had to ask the question, and that nearly got her head bitten off too.

"You know how to shoot that thing, right?"

Oh boy. Angela fair spat the words out, _of course I fucking do, that was a giant flying fucking insect, do you expect me to be a crack shot after being frozen for two hundred fucking years_ and a few more _fucking_ this and a few more _fucking_ that and even after a part-year on the caravans Annie was impressed by how many _fuckings_ she managed to wedge into her rant.

Still, she let it wash over her. Her other brother Mikey, though she was the only one allowed to call him that, to everyone else he was Michael or they'd get the sharp edge of his tongue, he'd been a shouter. He'd been a hitter for a little while, too, only ever things until he'd raised a hand to Petie once and Ma Taylor had given him The Talk. Annie'd heard The Talk and knew she never wanted to hear it for herself, or to see the disappointment in those gray eyes. She wondered sometimes if it made it sweeter, though, when those eyes were turned on him with pride, when you could see the heart in her chest bursting with it when he said he was off to join the Minutemen. Didn't think it was right to let the Raiders and the Gunners run amok, he said, wanted to make a difference, he said.

He lasted about a year before the note arrived from his General, _sorry for your loss, here's what we could find_. Such is life in the Commonwealth. Or, you know. Not.

By that point, Angela had run out of _fucking_ things to throw at Annie and was stood with her hands over her face, trembling hands, just breathing.

"It's okay," said Annie. "I understand."

"You don't," came the reply, through gritted teeth.

"Okay," said Annie. "Maybe I don't. But I've been walking these hills and roads for a long time. And I do want to help. Will you let me?"

Slowly, cautiously, Angela let down her hands from her eyes. Her face looked a little more drawn than it had just a few minutes ago, like the Commonwealth had already sucked a little bit of the life out of her. So Annie reached into her pack, careful to keep eye contact so as not to spook her, and pulled out a bottle of nuka-cola, her second-last one. She cracked it open and took a sip to prove it wasnt poisoned, a tip she learned from striking deals in Bunker Hill, and handed it over, getting a thank you in return but only after half the drink had disappeared.

She nodded to let Angela finish off the rest of it, then reached back in her pack to dig out a coat for her too, something a little less conspicuous than that bright blue suit. It was just a thin duster, never really did her much good warmth-wise, but even if it was a bit grimy it was in good condition so she couldn't quite bear to let it go. Good thing too, as it turned out.

And it turned out that Angela knew the area pretty well too, so working out a route into Concord was far easier than it could have been. And with one hunting rifle and one pea-shooter pistol, making their way to the center of the place was also easier than it could have been.

At that rate, they could have caravans going back through within the week.

Well. If it hadn't been for the whole thing with the you-know-what that you and I know's coming. That sort of thing spooks people.

But we'll get to that in a bit.

There was shouting and red laser fire coming from a building at the end of the square, which was distracting the raiders enough for them not to notice the twin angels of death approaching from behind.

Angela rested her arms over the top of a trash can and let out a breath before firing two bullets right into the back of the final raider's head.

"You really do know how to shoot that thing," said Annie.

Angela turned back and treated her to a sweet little grin.

Annie smiled right back.


	5. Chapter 5

The Museum of Freedom was about as filled of raiders as the street had been, which is to say suspiciously un-filled. The ones that were there were assholes, though, hence the hat on the balcony calling for help, but they were easily despatched once again. And that was partly due to the booming red shots from up above making their heads snap from one side to the other like a stingwing that can't decide which head of the radstag to go for first.

Angela dashed ahead with what was already becoming a customary lack of foresight and wrapped her hands around the bars of a gate.

"We need to get through here," she said, and shook those bars like a prisoner in a jail cell, except these bars were for some reason stronger than any active lock-up in the Commonwealth right then. "Damnit, it's locked. We'll have to go round."

Annie'd already had a bit of a listen-out when she was pointing beside the door and telling Earl to stay put and knew that there were at least two more assholes hidden in a side room, unless one was really invested in the conversation with the voices in his head. Not exactly outside the bounds of possibility with raiders, but those are the guys with the molotovs they're not afraid to use at close quarters. So she dug out a few bobby pins and the strip of metal she'd been using since her screwdriver broke, and held them up in the air.

"No need," she said.

The girl - shit, did it again, sorry - Angela's eyes brightened for a second like she'd forgotten she was in a post-apocalyptic hellscape and this was some kind of exciting rule-breaking transgression against The Man, which I gather used to excite people back in the day.

Annie didn't quite get that context however, so she just turned her attention to the gate and treated Angela to a free lecture, Lockpicking 101, and maybe a bit of Cursing 103 when the strip of metal slipped and jabbed her in her palm (not that she really needed that particular class given all the earlier _fuckings_ , but I suppose it's about breadth of vocabulary when you get to that level). But the gate swung open and she didn't do her cursing that loud (Stealth 101? I don't know, I don't got the course notes) so they made it up the stairs in one piece.

Top of the steps were two guys too busy shouting at a locked door to hear stomping footsteps and floorboards that creaked like a brahmin passing wind, so Annie had time to line up two shots while Angela crept herself into position to finish off with the peashooter, which was actually surprisingly effective from point-blank range.

They turned around the corner. The door creaked open, cautious-like.

"Come on," it said. "In here, hurry!"

"You go on," said Annie, as Angela was already half-way toward it, not to mention the dog bouncing ahead of her like his toes were made of springs. It seemed a little late to try to stop her, but none of that laser fire had come at either of them even when they had been stood right out in the open, so she figured it probably wasn't an ambush.

Dead Minuteman on the ground outside had given her pause, mind.

She slunk back down the stairs, avoiding the creakiest of creaky floorboards, wishing she had her shotgun for two quick and bloody blasts but she'd left that back in her lodge to save on the weight. So instead she had to sneak it, steadying herself against the wall for the first shot and hoping she could reload fast enough to avoid part 2: the molotov-ening.

In the middle of searching the bodies for ammo and maybe a screwdriver cos raiders break into shit too, or at least she thought so, she heard footsteps pattering down the stairs. There were six of them, only two of them human-loud so she didn't hurl herself behind the display which turned out to be a good thing considering the bag of grenades and shit sat down there.

Footsteps pattered back up again.

Three of the grenades looked usable, 48-96-144 caps and she was feeling in a pretty good mood, so maybe, just maybe she'd give a discount. She tucked them in her pack along with an unopened pack of snack cakes and a bottle of Gwinett Dark.

The ground shook. She waited a few seconds before shaking the plaster dust from the top of her head, and went back on out to the main hall to check on Earl.

He was still sat down by the door, looking real small. Nervous, pink tongue darting out and slapping against that black nose of his every couple of seconds.

"Just a fusion engine," she said, scratching behind his bald little ears. "Probably overheated from a laser blast earlier. Nothin' to worry about."

Lick. Lick. Lick. Rat-a-tat-a-tat. Lick.

Wait. What?

She cracked open the door and peered out.

"What in the hell?"

There was only a god-damned robot stomping around out there, spraying bullets out over the rest of the raiders who'd finally thrown down their cards or chems or whatever the hell it was they'd been doing while Annie and Angela had been cutting a swathe through their compadres.

Annie watched it for a moment, through that thin sliver of open door. It was attacking the raiders, which was a fair sign it wasn't on _their_ side, but she didn't know who it belonged to. Then she spotted a raider up on a roof, pinging bullets off the side of the robot's head, and she was in an indulgent mood, so she dropped her pack, telling Earl to keep an eye on it, checked her rifle and dropped to her knee on the stone steps outside the Museum.

Door shut behind her. Body tumbled two storeys to the ground.

She could have gone right back in, having done what she initially set out to do, but there were a few more raiders and it did look like the robot was flagging, a little, the minigun glowing red and failing to give out any more bullets.

In for a cap, in for a handful of caps. She took a breath and darted across the open courtyard, into the remains of a shop with boarded up windows and a nice set of stairs up to the second floor. That would have been a good vantage point from which to see the deathclaw pop out of the ground and take out the remaining raiders with a couple of swipes, but as it was she was just in the doorway and had to experience it through the medium of screams.

The robot turned and lumbered away, and that's when she realised it was a set of armor and there was an actual person in there. A person who didn't seem to be that keen on facing down a giant mutated lizard.

Who is? A foolhardy asshole, that's who. And the ones who boast about it after are even worse.

"Over here!" she yelled, "In the shop! Deathclaws can't get through doors!"

Course, as she said that, a splinter of doorframe came away in her hand. And she didn't exactly stop to think if a set of power armor could get through a door, either, but lucky for the occupant, it was a perfect fit.

Least a thousand minigun bullets and Annie's entire stash of .38s later, the deathclaw gave up its grip on life. Annie stood over the corpse with her new friend and wondered if a person in a set of power armor could carry as much as Betsy had been able to, because there was a whole lot of meat and hide on this beast and it'd be a crying shame to let it go to waste.

There was a clunk, and a hiss, and the back of the suit swung open, nearly clocking Annie right in the head. A bright blue leg swung out, but it didn't find any floor waiting for it, so the rest of a bright blue body followed it out a little more precipitously than was probably planned.

"Oh shit..."

On some kind of reflex Annie stuck out an arm and broke her fall, cos you guessed it (not exactly rocket science, I know, the whole _blue_ thing), it was Angela.

She looked up into Annie's eyes. "Are you alright?" she asked, as though Annie were the one that'd just birthed herself backwards from a robot.

All Annie could do was blink.


	6. Chapter 6

She went back inside the Museum just to pick up her pack and collect Earl. Poor little bastard clung tight to her heels the whole way to Sanctuary, specially after they passed that downed deathclaw.

"I can't believe you actually killed that thing," said the leader of the group. Garvey his name was, and when he said it he was staring in absolute wonderment at Angela, back inside the suit now, clanking down the road beside him.

Annie didn't get much of a greeting from the rest of 'em. A quick _hey_ from the big guy with the big hair, a blank stare from the little guy with the sad face, and the cold shoulder from the younger woman. Annie liked cold shoulders, though, she knew what to do with them. Let 'em drift by. Either they warm up or they don't, and she preferred the latter.

She fell back to the rear of the group. Too many people for her liking, and none of them as seemed to be actually looking out for dangers barring Garvey. The rest were gawping away at the local sights or, as in the case of Mama Murphy, looking straight ahead of her with a pacific smile on her face. She was shuffling along in a pair of fluffy slippers and didn't seem to care much where she was or who she was with.

Well, that's not entirely true. There was one moment when she looked right up at Annie, her eyes pink and bloodshot and full of the Sight.

"It's bright out here," she said. "But I know it's still there. And so does she."

And Annie just nodded because she understood, and neither of them needed to make a big deal about it.

Sanctuary turned out to be a decent-sized place, lots of broken-down but liveable houses and a few bits and pieces of tillable earth. There was junk all over the place, though, lying right across the street as though nobody'd been there for years. Annie'd seen the place before, stood on the other side of the creek even, but the sound of buzzing bloatflies had kept her away. She didn't mind dealing with them so much as she always seemed to reach it when she was running low of her ammo and water rations for the day. As much as could be expected from a place so far remote from her lodge, from everywhere.

Big guy with the big hair, Sturges he turned out to be called, he stood with his hands on his hips staring up at the suit as though it were a gift from heaven itself, and Garvey was already looking at the former occupant in about the same manner. Angela kept giving the side-eye to a house across the street, but it didn't seem that anybody had picked up on that.

Whatever that meant, nobody was paying Annie much mind, so she went out the back of the place and took a look around. There were a few dusty little fruit plants, melons by the look of the leaves, maybe a gourd or two, though they weren't so fruitful as they should have been given the time of year. So she let them be and dragged a few bits of broken brick and stone out of the dirt.

"What are you doing?" came a sharp voice.

Bent over double as she was, she looked under her arm. The younger woman it was, Marcy, her arms folded and a sharp look on her sharp face.

"Buildin' a fire," said Annie, pointing at the pile of stones. "Got some radstag in my pack, thought I'd fire that up for y'all. You plannin' on settlin' here?"

Marcy shrugged. "If we don't all die to the first radstorm or whatever fucking assholes attack us next. Either that or we keep walking until our legs fall off."

"Well, you can't get much further north than this and stay in the Commonwealth," said Annie, straightening up. "It's here or you're out in the real wilderness. And trust me, you don't want that."

"Why would I trust you?" snapped Marcy.

Annie shrugged. "You don't have to," she said. "Way I see it, you've got some roofs and a couple of vines here that should do you good for next year. Might need to make some friends before then, though."

"Vines?" said Marcy.

"Yeah," said Annie. "Couple melons and a gourd. Might be more around, this is just what I saw so far. You a farmer?"

"Of course not," said Marcy. "I mean... there wasn't much space for that in Quincy. And I had to look after..."

Her voice trailed away.

Annie had a good idea what she was talking about, or to be more precise, not talking about. She didn't have much of an idea how to help, however, other than keeping on as she was going. She turned away, looked down at the dry earth, parched and grey, without a single weed even clinging onto life.

"Vines are real easy to look after," she said. "Get a brahmin and shovel as much shit over 'em as you can stomach. Keep 'em well hoed, too, when the weeds come in. Can be a full-time job if you really want 'em to come out nice."

When she turned around, the other woman's hands were gripping tight onto the shabby wooden fence, her face red and her eyes wet.

"I'll shout ya up when it's ready," said Annie, collecting the rocks in the hem of her shirt. She waited for Marcy to nod then headed back out to civilization.

She built up the fire in the gap between the houses, not too close but sheltered enough from a wind that had started whipping through the place like there was a storm on the way, though it didn't smell so. Everything smelled different up this way, though, right down to the dirt itself, not as much salt or some such.

She dragged out one of the tubs of radstag from her pack and hacked the contents into steaks with the knife from her boot. It wasn't until the smoke started to rise, thick with grease and gamey odors, that the folks even seemed to remember she was there. They gathered, quiet at first, quiet later too cos they all seemed pretty stunned by the events of the day.

When she'd eaten her fill, Annie got to her feet.

"Come on, Earl," she said.

The dog sneezed in reply, as was his wont, and nosed a goodbye at his new best friend who'd turned out to be called Dogmeat, which was a pretty odd name for a dog, or so thought Annie. Call a stingwing that, maybe, she'd never met a dog that didn't like to chew on or suck out the gooey insides of a stingwing exoskeleton, but don't call a dog that. Asking for trouble.

Still, not her decision.

Earl by her side, she shouldered her pack.

"Oh," said Angela. "Are you going?"

"Yeah," said Annie. "My lodge is a ways away, I should leave now so as I get back before dark." And maybe swing by that deathclaw carcass, she added to herself.

"Please," said Angela. "Stay. Don't go back out there alone. You helped me. I don't know what I would have done if you hadn't come along."

Annie hesitated for a good long moment. Leave a place alone for a night and you never know who'll have set up there. Hell, she'd left the lodge for a couple of hours once and come back to find a feral ghoul just napping on her porch like he owned the place. And maybe he had, so she'd just scared him off, rather than going full kerblammo on his ass.

"I don't have a bedroll," she said. "And I'm out of water."

"I don't have anything," said Angela, with the loneliest and most pleading look in her eyes.

So Annie dropped her pack and sat back down by the fire.


	7. Chapter 7

Annie stayed in Sanctuary for a few days actually, every one of them with a rising sense of worry in her stomach at what she'd find when she got back to her lodge. But there was a lot to do to fix the basics, and not many people to do it, and the couch she'd adopted as her temporary abode was more comfortable than her shabby old bedroll on her splintered wooden floor no matter how many straw pillows she piled up behind it so she went with it.

Earl seemed to be happy, anyway, barking his way around the settlement like a damn fool, finding a stuffed bear in one of the houses or thereabouts that he carried around in his mouth as gentle as if it were his own pup. Well. When he wasn't shaking it in his teeth like a near-expired stingwing, that is. Predatorial instinct, or some such.

Marcie settled down to tend the gray little vines and her husband turned out to be a decent carpenter, so they were both well-occupied if fractious. Garvey strode around the place with a frown on his face and a laser musket in his hands, but every so often she'd catch him looking at Angela with a little smile on his face and find an odd response in her stomach, a little twist that she hadn't felt before and couldn't ascribe to any particular emotion.

On the third day she left them to it and walked down to the Red Rocket with the boy Sturges, watched him coo over the set-up there like a nesting deathclaw. Had to take out a few molerats, sure, using her bat so as not to waste her precious last bits of ammo, but it was worth it to see that look in his bright blue eyes. _Just like my brother's_ , she thought, but she tried not to dwell on that too much.

From up on the roof of the place, boosted there from the top of a dumpster piled high with crap, she saw smoke rising from down the hill.

"Aw shit," said Sturges after she pulled him up beside her, blanching when he turned and saw that same plume of smoke. "Raiders?"

"Naw," she said, rubbing her eyes, screwing them up to see through the late autumnal mists which seemed to glow as bright as a radstorm, maybe brighter even, certainly obscuring everything just as effectively. "I think that's the Abernathy's place. You should go down there and say hi at some point. Decent folk. Got a good stock of timber from clearing their place out, might come in useful to fix this place up afore winter."

Not just that but if she recalled correctly, they had a pretty well-tended farm going producing far more tatoes than a family of four could eat. The tins of crap Angela'd found in an old root cellar, the few bits of food preserved in dead refrigerators and Annie's own rapidly-maturing pack of radstag that she'd given up as lost from a trading or preserving point of view wouldn't last long, certainly not through a whole winter. And comfortable as that couch might have been, she didn't plan to stay that long.

When they got back to Sanctuary, she sat down at the fire right next to Angela. That blue jumpsuit of hers was a whole lot less clean than it had been a few days before, and the smell of her was about as ripe as any of the inhabitants.

"I have to go to Diamond City," she said. Again. It'd started to turn into a catchphrase, a mantra, a thing she'd say when there was nothing else to say because she just wanted it that goddamned much.

"I know," said Garvey, for the hundredth time, his phrase to match hers. "But you need to take things slow. You need to adjust. And we can't just leave these people here on their own."

Annie'd learned about the whole frozen-for-two-hundred-years thing by that point, you understand. But she didn't rightly know what to think about it, so that was another thing she tried not to think about too much. Not that she didn't believe it, she'd heard of stranger things happening in the Commonwealth, and a good few of them about Vault-Tec and their shenanigans. Although to be fair, most of them had come from the lips of Ma Taylor and so maybe weren't as credible as they perhaps could have been.

Still. Whatever her age might have been she was sat right there poking a stick into the fire. "I have to go to Diamond City," she repeated, and turned to Annie. "Will you come with me? You helped me before. Will you help me again? Please?"

For half a second Annie considered it. But just like every other time she'd been asked, the thought of the city left her cold. No, worse than that. Cold and dead. Like if she set foot in that place she'd never leave it. So she shook her head. "I'm not the city type. Your friend here's right, you need to hold your brahmin and wait til you got this place set up safe. Trust us, we know what we're talking about."

She wasn't so sure that he did, with his sad eyes and dejected demeanour, but he nodded back at her as if he were thankful and he was urging caution and there's nothing wrong with a bit of that every now and again.

But Angela turned her sweet dark eyes back on him, and so it was hardly a surprise that a couple of days later, she and him were both strapping packs on their backs and heading down south, with Dogmeat trotting by their side.

"You look after yourselves," said Annie, as they walked off with barely a backward glance.

Sturges looked up from the auto-firing turret thingie he was setting up by the bridge.

"You off too, huh?"

She couldn't deny that she had her own pack on her back, and her own dog by her side. "Yeah," she said. "I got a place down by the Pond as I haven't checked on in a while. Seems like as good a time as any to bow out. You folks gonna be alright?"

"Sure," he said. "Pretty quiet up this way. And I'm thinkin' I can make two, maybe three more turrets before I'm pullin' apart the useful shit to do it."

Annie smiled. "I know a trader," she said. "Lotsa junk, all the junk you can eat in fact. I'll send her up this way, if she don't find her way here on her own."

"Hey," he said, his eyes bright. "If she's real well-stocked I reckon I can cobble together some kind of purifier. Then we'll really be talkin'."

She shook his hand, then, a real good slap of the palms and a test of upper arm strength. He was a big guy, and it wasn't exactly a full-on arm-wrestle on the side of the bridge like she'd been treated to once or twice in Bunker Hill, but he grinned and clapped his hand against her other arm anyway.

"Seeya'round, darlin'," she said, touching her fingers to her forehead.

"Not if I don't see you first," he replied.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> note: this chapter was produced as part of NaNoWriMo '16. quality not assured. ;)

Before we go on to the next chapter in the life of Annie Rosalia Halo Taylor, I have a confession to make. I forgot to tell you one thing. There was another moment with Mama Murphy, when the old woman shuffled up beside her on her slippered feet, peering up into Annie's face which was an odd sensation for Annie cos she never thought herself that tall to begin with.

"Keep your feet on the ground," said Mama Murphy, and gestured above Annie's head with her eyes as though she were too tired to do much more. "You may have that, but you don't got wings."

The Sight's an odd thing at the best of times and it didn't help much that the stink of jet hung thick in the air, almost enough of it to give Annie a buzz herself. And not fifteen minutes before, Annie'd watched Angela giving furtive glances around herself before heading into Mama Murphy's chosen abode in Sanctuary. Almost comical, it was, like a cartoon villain 'cept comparing little Angela to a villain ain't an appropriate comparison to make so don't put too much stock in that particular part of it.

(It also wasn't much more of a coincidence that this happened just before that same blue-clad survivor had gotten _real_ insistent on heading for the City, but Annie didn't put two and two together to come to that conclusion herself, not right away.)

Anyhow, you never know when the Sight might come in handy but you don't want to lay too much stock in it, neither, specially when you consider where it comes from. So Annie nodded sagely, and stored the phrase away. She was thinking of it in fact when she walked over the bridge those few days later, feet echoing loudly on its rotten planks, hoping someone'd think to shore it up some way or somehow before any real transportation tried to make it over. She was perfectly well-equipped to imagine Betsy's eye-rolling response to a hoof going right through the wood, after all, and she couldn't picture any other pack brahmin being much more cheerful about that precipitous journey to the ground.

But that wasn't her job any more or her problem, so put the thought aside and looked down south over the Commonwealth. She couldn't see much of it, all the broken and mutant-infested buildings of the old city hidden by a thickening fog, and it didn't take much time walking for a glance over her shoulder to show it'd swallowed up Sanctuary too. She wondered if she'd be back to see the place again, and not long after that thought she wondered if Angela would ever make it back there either or if the Commonwealth'd chew her up and spit her out like Earl with... well, with whatever he'd found to chew up and spit out on that particular day.

Still. She never saw much point in dwelling on circumstances entirely out of her control, so she kept on walking. She considered heading over to the Abernathy place and introducing herself on behalf of Sanctuary's growling stomachs, but they needed to learn at least some lessons for themselves. And she also considered a trip down to Concord, see if there was anything left to scavenge from those asshole raiders or the big old deathclaw. But no; it wasn't warm, not by any stretch of the imagination, but that corpse would be high as a kite by now and probably surrounded by every stingwing and bloatfly in the northern Commonwealth.

Maybe that was why the path was so clear, all the way back to the Pond. Her lodge looked kinda small and primitive after just a few days in the veritable metropolis of Sanctuary, which didn't please Annie over-much. But that the tripwire she'd set up on the porch was intact, that did. It didn't have much in the way of firepower attached to it, just a low-powered shotgun more to make a noise than anything else. You'll find some folk putting whole firebomb traps down, or clusters of grenades hanging from the roof ready to blow if someone just tall enough might be just dumb enough to walk right into them. But that'd take the whole lodge out with it and hence Annie chose a more modest way of defending the place.

After disarming the trap and checking the shotgun for rust, she elbowed her way in and found nothing missing and no more leaks in the roof. But it certainly wasn't any warmer than it had been before nor any more well-stocked, and now she didn't have a pack full of radstag either.

"Well, Earl," she said to the dog, who was still chewing on that bear and thus not really paying attention. "We've been set back a few days, sure, but it's nothin' we can't come back from."

And so she set about regaining that time. Restocked on ammo from supplies that were significantly less in jeopardy than her food stores she headed out the next day and came across a plum find, a huge-antlered radstag stepping proudly through the lingering autumnal mist. It turned one of its heads and looked right at her, seeming to gaze right into her soul. And she almost felt like she ought to let such a majestic creature walk away, like it might be the lingering spirit of an old God or the kind of thing she'd read about in that old book of mythologizing.

But she was damn hungry by that point so she shot it right between the eyes.

(Both pairs, when the other realized what was happening and looked up too.)

And it turned out that the Old God of the Commonwealth was probably urging her to do the deed because it was only a couple of days of dragging bits of radstag back to the lodge and onto her makeshift smoker that the first snows came. Only light ones, sure, and only the tiniest bit tainted with rads, but the first nonetheless. Not knowing how long this burst of winter might last, Annie took stock of her supplies; plenty of razorgrain flour, a sack of dried tatoes, a whole heap of carrots she'd gotten a good price for off a nervous-looking farmer way over in the west, pain in the ass as it was to carry them back with her. Most importantly, mind, a good supply of water, cans and cartons both, plus a couple precious bottles of Gwinnett Stout.

In the next few days, still processing the meat, and in the brief hours of daylight that were left to her, she checked up on her stove, clearing out a glut of feathers from the flue that suggested some damn fool bird might have actually tried to set up a nest in there. She boarded up one of the windows too, the worst-broken one, and if the wind was in the right direction it sent up a bit of an alarming howl but as long as Earl was beside her, paws twitching as he chased molerats in his sleep, it didn't worry her overmuch.

Snow started to settle on the ground, turning the landscape into a bare bright landscape cut by dark dead branches rather than the usual brown cut by brown affair. She could still make her way around, long as she wrapped herself up tight. But after a couple nights the snow started to drift up onto the porch, and then up to the door, and that's when she decided to cut her losses and wait out the storm from the inside.

So on the third of November, 2287, she sat back on a bedroll spread out over a pile of straw pillows, scruffed her fingers over the back of Earl's neck, and cracked open a beer.


	9. Chapter 9

As you might imagine, being cooped up in a little wooden lodge with only a not-so-far-from-feral mutt for company ain't so interesting. Annie always had a couple books in her pack, that's true, but she'd read 'em both a dozen times before so there weren't exactly no revelations to be had within those pages. But she did have a little radio that she'd set up right next to her bedroll. So every so often, when the howlin' of the wind started to sound a bit too much like a pissed-off mutie hound for her liking, she'd switch it on and tune it to Diamond City Radio to hear what if anything was going on down in the ruins.

After the initial buzz over what they were now calling the 'founding' of Sanctuary, proper grand terminology to Annie's mind seeing as she'd actually seen the state the place was in, it all came down to the same old same old. No news, and while sometimes that might well be good news, in this case it was just no news, and a bit of a disappointment at that. That was maybe - just maybe - because a little tiny part of Annie was listening out in case she might hear something of the little vault dweller who'd been so keen to keep her around until she wasn't any more.

Still, nothing of any import was forthcoming despite how hard she tried to concentrate on the DJ's nervous stuttering, so she spun the dial a little bit just to see if there was anything else going on. Of course, even in the quietest parts of the Commonwealth the airwaves were always full of whispers of a world long-lost, ham radios and distress beacons that didn't do their owners much good and would probably only get would-be rescuers into equal trouble of their own. But sometimes you'd hear something fresh, a warning of a wandering mama deathclaw, the occasional call out to traders for supplies - though you had to be careful with that kind of thing because you never should forget. There's only one letter 'tween a trader and a raider and it don't come in a fragranced envelope.

(Well. Ill-advised Commonwealth romances aside, but I'm sure you catch my drift.)

Anyway, twirling the dial, shivering in her bedroll cos Earl got real fidgety real quick and had already got himself banished to the outside of it... wouldn't you believe it? Annie did hear somethin' new.

> Attention Commonwealth residents. Are you looking for a safe place to settle? Home in on these coordinates. If you're willing to work hard, you can make the Commonwealth a better place.

The pronouncement was followed by some map references, carefully enunciated by the same soft female voice, then some stirring music that Annie'd not heard before. Now even in the twenty-four years she'd been roughly cognizant, Annie hadn't heard more than a couple dozen tunes and none of those less than a couple hundred times. So she sat there, wide-eyed, as the notes drifted into one ear and... well, right out the other. Stirring as it was, her fingers were already reaching out for the off switch.

The silence that followed was broken only by the sound of the unfolding of her map, and then the faint whisper of her finger tracing over it. Slowly but surely, it narrowed in on a location not so far from where she happened to be right then.

Sunshine Tidings Co-op.

"Well," said Annie. "How do you like that."

She'd been by that place before, by which I mean she'd skirted well around it considering the tell-tale signs of grumbling and moaning that told of a feral infestation, not to mention the defective Mr Handy bobbing around the place making just as fearful a racket. Then she'd came face to face with an angry yao-guai in a little cave burrowed into the rocks nearby and made an exit back toward the north, pretty sharpish.

At the sound of her voice Earl looked away from the radio, momentarily distracted from his concern that the voices in the little orange box were about to materialize outside of it.

"You recognized that voice too, huh?" asked Annie.

His ears pricked up and he made a noise that's a little bit more like the kind of sound a duck makes than a dog but generally indicates some level of positivity.

"Must've been recorded a while back," said Annie, lifting her elbow as the mutt scooted himself right up next to her, and only rearing back a little as a hot puff of radstag-breath huffed right up in her face. "I mean, only a fool'd be wandering the Commonwealth in this kinda weather, let alone tryin' to set up a place for people to live."

Earl sneezed and settled himself down with the bare minimum of skinny little paws digging into her thigh to make her comfortable for him.

"No," said Annie, with a bemused shake of the head. "I don't know why I ain't heard that beacon before now. Maybe the wind direction's changed, or somethin'."

She sighed and stood herself up, disturbing the dog almost as soon as he'd settled himself down but leaving a nice warm spot in her bedroll for him to curl up in as a fair trade. She headed over to the window, pulling back the edge of the cloth she'd stapled over it to keep out the draft. Though she got a breath of cold on her eyeballs as she peered out, she couldn't see a damn thing. Maybe it was snowing, maybe it was sleeting, maybe it was a clear and starry sky. All looks the same on a dark Commonwealth night, specially viewed through a grubby old window like that one.

Accordingly, Annie returned herself to her bedroll and her attention to the radio, tapping the top of it and scraping a sliver of something disgusting out from under the dial. "Maybe the damn thing's on the way out," she grumbled, but giving it an encouraging tap so as to reassure it that she didn't mean no offence. "I mean, it can't be a new beacon. Maybe she... someone did clear out that ghoul-infested hellhole and I just didn't know about it."

She picked up her book again but though she was turning pages, she weren't taking in any of those words. After the eighteenth time of going back to find a single word she ever remembered reading, she put the book aside and let out a deep sigh.

"Well," she said, looking up at the roof and not the stack of cans in the corner. "We are a little low on water."

Earl huffed, cos he might not have known the difference between a can of purified and a brick but he did know the difference between awake and asleep and she didn't seem to be respecting his intentions in that regard. Then, to add insult to injury, she spoke again, her gaze drifting over to the doorway next to which lay the few spit-soaked scraps of teddy bear she'd managed to retrieve from his jaws.

"And it ain't like you've got nothing better to do," she said. "So what do you say, lil' guy? You fancy a change of scenery?"


	10. Chapter 10

After a fitful night of sleep and an equally fitful morning of continuing this pretense that she was low on supplies, Annie unbarred and opened the door. The cold hit her like a punch in the face, and it was a damn good punch at that. Short, sharp, and while it didn't knock her out it certainly made her good and woozy for a moment or six.

"Well," she said, eyes watering. "Nice day for it."

She dragged her pack out the door and dumped it in the crusty remains of the snow, whistling at Earl to get him to follow suit. But even though she'd set him up with a little canine sweater she'd fashioned for him out of an old sweater of her own, it being too far gone in the shoulders for her rudimentary darning skills to rescue, he hung back inside the lodge with his thin little tail tucked right between his legs.

"C'mon Earl," she said, feeling not a little guilty as she encouraged him out by means of a gentle connection of her boot with his butt. "Let's go get you another bear."

She locked up and knelt down on the porch to set the tripwire back up. Then she hoisted her pack onto her back and started to walk.

It was a bright and clear day (as mentioned), and there'd only been a few inches of snow, though of course it'd drifted in places almost to the height of the little dog. The air seemed to sparkle, in fact, like the ground itself, or maybe that was the effect of all that bright and cold on her eyes that left her wishing she had some sunglasses or something to protect herself from the glare.

Didn't help, of course, that she was walking almost due east and not long after dawn.

Now I know what you're thinkin'; 'you said that lodge was roundabout the pond and I know for a fact Sunshine Tidings is about a fifteen-twenty minute walk south of there.'

Well. You probably worked out by now that Annie is a woman you could charitably describe as strong-willed. Contrary, mayhaps, if you're feelin' less of that charitability. Goddamned difficult if you've gotten on her wrong side or she on yours. To her mind, she'd only just heard the radio signal so to turn up next day might seem like she'd been waitin' on it. From her days at Bunker Hill and on the road she knew that if you turned up late to the caravan park you'd be shit out of luck, sure. But you show up too early and you're good as stickin' a sign on your back sayin' how ripe you are to be taken advantage of.

So; East.

She set off pretty slow, not wanting to seem like she was too keen even to be walking in the opposite direction to Sunshine Tidings, though she soon sped up when a tell-tale patch of cold started to seep in the left side of her left-hand boot.

Didn't much matter though. She was going somewhere she'd be able to get a replacement.

Earl trotted along beside her, hopping from rock to rock and trying to keep his paws out of the wet. I don't know if you've ever seen a tiny dog use all the weapons in its arsenal to win a bit of sympathy or that last bit of snack cake, but the combined effect is pretty powerful. He shivered and he whimpered and he whined, and he ran just far enough ahead of her as he could to get the most time with his big milky eyes fixed right on hers.

"Hey," she said, after a little while. "Stop giving me those sad little looks. Ain't that sweater enough for you?"

He whined.

"Alright," she said. "But we ain't gonna be walking long. An hour, tops."

He whimpered, compounding the effect with a particularly dramatic shiver.

"Well, I ain't carryin' you," she said. "So get that thought outta your mind."

  
About an hour later, with her pack on her back and Earl tucked under her arm, she ducked her way into the Drumlin Diner.

"Trudy," she said, stamping snow off her feet and placing Earl down on the linoleum floor, whereupon he shook himself and shivered some more just in case anyone was watching.

"Annie," came the reply, along with a nod and only a bare glance at the animal. "Long time no see."

"Sure has been. You been well?"

"Can't complain."

"Oh, I'm sure you can," said Annie, swinging herself onto one of the stools in front of the counter and looking around the otherwise empty diner. "If you put your mind to it. Patrick?"

The woman blinked, then, gave that little side-flick of the eyes that says _go ahead and ask but I'm already thinkin' about lyin' in response_.

Annie's heart sank a little.

"We had a little trouble," said Trudy, slowly. "Some asshole chem-pusher and his sidekick."

"Oh no," said Annie. "Trudy. I'm so sorry to hear that."

"Oh no no," said Trudy, raising her hands, dirty cloth caught in her grasp just slipping out to slap against her wrist. "I didn't mean to sound morbid. Patrick's fine, he's just doin' a run up to Starlight for some screws and such. I had a run on building materials lately."

"Oh," said Annie, relieved. "Okay. What about the pushers?"

Trudy remained grim-faced. "Buried out back."

Annie leant back from the counter, something of an incredulous look on her face. You don't last long in the Commonwealth without bein' able to end a life. But you don't get into the chem trade without being even better at it. At least you don't stay in it that long. Or keep your product. Or limbs, for that matter.

"Turns out Patrick's got a guardian angel," said Trudy. "Two of 'em, actually. Names, uh. Preston and, uh..."

You guessed it.

"Angela," said Annie, in a voice that sounded downright reverential.

Now it was Trudy's turn to look surprised. "You know her?"

"Yeah," said Annie, collectin' herself. She leaned forward again, folding her arms and frowning down at her fingernails. "I met her. I think, anyhow."

Trudy raised her eyebrows. "Well, what are the chances of that. Anyhow, they dropped in at just the right time. Assholes were threatening to torch the place with us in it. I think she tried to talk to them but... well. I already told you how it ended."

Annie nodded, sagely. Chem pushers were about the only folks to voluntarily walk into settlements, raider dens _and_ Gunner encampments, which showed a significant lack of reasoning ability in the first place. So the chances of them being persuaded by even the most silver-tongued among us to give up on a pile of caps that rightly or wrongly they thought they deserved? Low to none.

For a moment Annie let herself be amused at the thought of little Angela unleashing a few _fuckings_ and other choice curses at them until they held up their hands and backed off, _jeez lady, okay, keep the cap_ s.

But that weren't how it ended. So she gained a bit of a cold, hollow feel in the pit of her stomach instead, and tuned back into Trudy so she didn't end up thinking too hard about Angela ducking fists, or bullets, or worse.

"Sweet thing, she was," mused Trudy. "Not likely to last long around here of course, but..."

A little blast of hot indignation rose up in Annie's chest, maybe as another way to distract herself from the insistent chill that was settling in down below it. _Saved **your** ass_ , she thought, but held that thought back. "Seems to be doin' just fine so far."

"Yeah," said Trudy, with a little shake of the head. "I suppose so. Now, did you come for a chat or are you actually here to take some of this junk off my hands?"


End file.
